Five Things Every PHP Developer Should Know
HTTP – Your platform is the web, so learn how it works. The deeper details of the HTTP protocol can be absolutely invaluable for any PHP developer to know. This will also help you understand proxies and caches in depth.
FastCGI – Most PHP deployments are on mod_php, but FastCGI can be a great alternative interface. It’s also universal, and will let you run many languages with only a single front-end service.
C – PHP is written in C, so it’s fundamental to writing extensions. By learning C well, you can not just write extensions, but also find and debug problems in the PHP scripting engine and existing extensions.
Network Programming – If you ever need to something complicated with PHP, like off-loading background processes for example, network programming is an extremely useful skillset. A basic understanding of sockets and daemons is already a huge benefit.
Your Operating System – I originally wanted to write ‘UNIX’ here. However, I realize that some of you deploy on Windows systems. I am not touching that argument with a ten foot pole. What ever your operating system is, learn it in depth. You’ll be surprised at what you can do.
